Rolfe Winkler

What AI hath wrought is amazing.

It's so big that even a company as large as Apple is forced to wait in line for commodity components that forever it was able to dictate terms for.

That's what AI has done.

These companies, whether it's Nvidia or the hyperscalers that are deploying Nvidia chips, are spending such gargantuan sums of money into the hundreds of billions, it will be trillions.

They're spending so much money and they're just going fast.

Right?

That they're just gobbling up all of the supply of these key components that's in everything we as consumers buy.

Did Tim Cook say anything about all this new competition for these chips?

He said, you know, in his 40 years in the electronic supply chain, he's never seen anything like this.

You know, he called it a 100-year flood.

and they're not building capacity super fast because this is a boom-bust cycle.

And if they build a lot of capacity for memory or desk space, the price of desks is gonna collapse and they'll be in trouble having built these massive factories.

So they're going slowly.

You can't just spin up a fab, a chip fab.

That's not how memory and storage chips works.

Bottom line is it takes years.

The American companies face restrictions working with those companies, sharing technology so that they can use those chips in their own products for national security reasons.

These are really important components, and policymakers in the U.S.

don't want China to have open access to this market.

I asked Tim Cook.